Skirting U.S. sanctions, Europeans launch trade mechanism for Iran - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-usa-sanctions-eu/germany-france-britain-to-launch-mechanism-for-trade-with-iran-idUSKCN1PP0K3 <comment><USER2> The mechanism, as I understand it, is just SWIFT network isolated from exposure to US, USD and banks with exposure to the US. It prevents US justice department from monitoring or preventing transactions.

It's my understanding that China has also licensed SWIFT software and will use it to create isolated payment system to shield it's trade with Iran and Russia other countries.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honest argument about these issues is no longer possible on HN or elsewhere on the Net. People immediately move into ideological formations and the rational conversation falls away. The down-votes and up-votes have nothing to do with content or even the subject but only with the perceived team. I would ban politically charged conversation on HN, if this was up to me.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about ban, but an automated mechanism which removes up/downvoting anytime their are too many in a thread sounds like a good option to me.

<comment><USER5> So that emotionally charged threads become pure shitshows?

That's a really bad idea. It would be better to delete the thread then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised that Britain is even behind this, as they might have been a bit nervous about the US response, considering their ongoing Brexit.

This is a great example of how current US foreign policy means a loss of soft power all over the world.

I do think that this is a win for world stability though, trading tends to help relations, which helps stops all sort of unpleasantness. Whether this will be enough i don't know, but it seems like a good step forward.

<comment><USER7> Practically speaking, the UK is completely screwed when it gets to choose who to trade with post-brexit. The deal the US will make with the UK will effectively be too good for the US (US hold all the cards) for the UK to have any form of negotiating power.

The US won't "not accept the deal" or "not make a trade deal with the UK" because UK trades with Iran, itt'l be too good for them to pass up. Itt'l be the only thing going that the UK can accept, no matter how bad it is, in an attempt to save face as they can't be seen to go back to trading with the EU especially on worse terms. This is devolving into a Brexit rant, but I can guarantee you that the US doesnt give two shits if the UK trades with Iran, they're rubbing their hands in anticipation of what is to come. UK knows this so is scrambling to do deals with whoever it can as soon as possible. This is my line of thinking anyway.

<comment><USER8> In terms of trade, how is it exactly they can complement each other? The geography is a bit of an issue for actual physical goods, and I'm not sure what the UK produces that the US needs. Luxury cars maybe, but IIRC most of these marques aren't even owned by the UK any more, except for perhaps the high end. Cheap Bentley's for American oligarchs?

Services, maybe - but again most of the core banking will move away from the UK post Brexit and even then there's a lot of overlap in competencies between the UK and USA. There's a lot of smart people in the UK for sure, but there's a lot of smart people in the US.

I can't help but think the whole idea of a US/UK trade alliance is borne more of anglophone ideology than any kind of practicalities.

<comment><USER7> You've misunderstood. Practically speaking, the UK needs to buy shit, the US needs to sell shit. UK has effectively blocked out 1/3 of the world (Europe) from a trade deal because we'd never get one as good as the current free trade agreement with the EU. Our politicians won't be stupid enough to say "we've left the EU, but have made a worse deal with Europe than we had before". Similarly EU won't make a deal with the UK which disallows freedom of movement and other "core" EU values, so any deal made would either require circumstances similar to pre-brexit EU to happen, or would just flat out be a worse deal.

Distance really isn't much of an issue at scale, when your cheap stuff comes from China - - edit - to clarify, the point i'm trying to make is that it really doesn't cost much to ship stuff halfway around the world, especially en masse. -, or meat from New Zealand, this isn't much of an argument. This would be a purely US beneficial deal, the UK wouldn't really be bringing anything into the US, other than maybe finance services, specialist products or (i guess) softer products like educational visas?

There's quite a big controversy over here at the moment about the possibility of a US trade deal. We are being told that for it to happen we would have to accept terms like chlorinated chicken/steroid injected beef, and then agree to other things like labeling the origin of the product (so you would never really know if you were eating US or UK products). There's a whole other host of subtleties which would degrade the UK whilst being beneficial to the US, just do a bit of googling about the proposed deals.

<comment><USER8> _> when your cheap stuff comes from China_

Yeah except neither party to this deal is producing "cheap stuff". Both consider themselves to be very much "top tier".

 _> edit - to clarify, the point i'm trying to make is that it really doesn't cost much to ship stuff halfway around the world, especially en masse_

Yeah, if the stuff is "cheap". Like dramatically cheaper than what you can produce at home.

<comment><USER7> lol mate you're really not getting it. You said "the geography is a bit of an issue for physical goods". I'm saying, when you can order a sheep from new zealand, or a USB stick from China, and have it show up a few days or a week later, this isn't really a good argument.

<comment><USER8> _" lol mate"_ what is this snapchat? , you're the one that's not getting it.

 _" The geography is a bit of an issue for physical goods"_ when you're not producing goods cheap enough to cover the cost of transit. The UK does not produce cheap goods. Quite the opposite.

I don't think racing to the bottom in living standards to compete productively with China is something that people voting for Brexit had in mind.

<comment><USER7> The UK would be IMPORTING goods from the US.. I don't get where you're getting this idea we'd be exporting cheap goods from the UK to the US. The examples i explicitly stated were things like education, specialized tech (which would be fine for shipping), and access to financial services, which once again doesn't need shipping. For the last time, i'm not saying that the UK is going suddenly start mass producing cheap goods to export to the US? I dont know where you've got that idea from. The US, however, does create a lot of cheap goods which they'd be exporting TO the UK, such as your corn, meats, etc.

The main issue people are concerned about is that the UK would be flooded with cheaper/sub standard goods (re. chlorinated chicken) that they can't differentiate between standard UK/EU products which are of a higher quality. Currently, US meat is outright banned in the EU, if there's an influx in cheap/chemically altered meats coming from the US which people can't differentiate from (this is partially due to the terms of the trading deal banning branding of goods as "Produced in the UK") then people are worried they'd accidentally end up buying them.

<comment><USER8> I'm understanding you alright ... so a massive trade deficit in USA's favour so!

Not such a concern about where you're going to get the £££ if all you're buying is cheap junk in $$$ but even so there's got to be cheaper places to buy cheap junk from and sure with the rules lifted why not just start producing cheap junk yourself!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good. I don't know how much longer Americans are going to buy the boogiemen we keep getting fed.

Sovereign nations under the the U.S.' thumb, not being able to control their own destiny only works so long as we're complacent.

I sense we're growing tired of war for war's sake, leery of ideological battles built for future blowback down the road. We see enough people profiting from these wars to wonder how much global conflict is manufactured.

I hope we stop buying in. When a politician tells us a country is evil, we need to start asking for receipts.

I don't see this having a ton of impact on U.S. relations other than a few terse, typo-laden tweets directed at Europe, but who knows these days. The notion that Western alliances are being intentionally weakened no longer seems far fetched.

<comment><USER10> _We see enough people profiting from these wars to wonder how much global conflict is manufactured. I hope we stop buying in._

We, the people, are pretty powerless here. Lobbyists and elected officials have too much power and election cycles are too far apart. So even when recent American military action gets relatively low support from Americans [0], neither congress nor the president has any motivation to do anything about it.

0 - [https://news.gallup.com/poll/208334/support-syria-strikes- ra...](https://news.gallup.com/poll/208334/support-syria-strikes-rates-low- historical-context.aspx)

<comment><USER11> You've forgotten how to protest. I recall you guys getting pretty upset over some tea with Britain.

Seriously as long as folks are content at home the politicians won't give a damn about you. Go march in the streets en mass and things will slowly change.

<comment><USER12> Are you implying that putting some filter over my facebook picture isn't an effective method of protest?

<comment><USER13> You raised awareness. (Slightly sarcasm)

<comment><USER14> Not only that, but you are also signalling to your environment that thy are not alone. That's also a key factor in many demonstrations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As America steps back from the world stage, we will see more alliances being forged that exclude the USA.

These plans of dissociation have been in motion for some time now. I think two ruinous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused a shift in American foreign policy that we are now starting to see play out more frequently. This will continue for many decades.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps, but this is orthogonal to that. This is to sidestep US sanctions.

The traditional (not current) left was for disengagement (WTO protests, Iraq protests), it's strange to see the left now argue for intervention and more internationalism and intervention and hegemony.

<comment><USER15> In the past, US allies like Germany, France, Britain, would never dream of crossing the US. A trade agreement that effectively promotes the Euro to sidestep the USD is Europe thumbing its nose at the US.

Yes, on the face of it, this is about sidestepping sanctions. But the implications of doing so go far deeper. The US posture today basically makes the US weaker in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Their CFOs better not travel to Canada anytime soon :D

<comment><USER18> Yeah, it definitely has the appearance of undercutting the importance of Huawei's alleged actions of breaking sanctions the US has imposed on Iran.

Be interesting which side Canada chooses. They might even get a wall out of it.

</comment></comment><comment> shaki-dora That's the thing with all the "soft" power the US has: you can maybe use it once or twice to bully allies into doing your bidding. But that's a terrible way to spent all the good will built over decades of mutually beneficial cooperation.

<comment><USER19> Some people in the US think that this good will is God given and not the result of decades of hard work so they are very willing to squander it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Washington says that, although Iran has met the terms, the accord was too generous, failing to rein in Iran's ballistic missile program or __curb its regional meddling. __" \- oh the irony!

</comment><comment><USER21> I find it even more interesting that my comment, which is factually correct, has been flagged.

The Yellow Vest movement started in France and has been prominent in the countries listed within the article. The governments of those countries have also been defying popular wishes, particularly regarding Brexit.

So I am curious as to why my comment should be flagged instead of replied to. Interesting indeed - hit a nerve?

</comment><comment><USER22> Kinda ironic, how Britain managed to organise a trade deal for Iran so quickly with EU neibours and yet utterly unable after years to organise its own trade needs.

<comment><USER23> yeah, I guess it's almost like the EU is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> IA Link[0], for Europeans (like myself), who get "Page Not Found".

[0] - [https://web.archive.org/web/20190131120900/https://www.reute...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190131120900/https://www.reuters.com/article/us- iran-usa-sanctions-eu/germany-france-britain-to-launch-mechanism-for-trade- with-iran-idUSKCN1PP0K3)

<comment><USER25> Am in Luxembourg, no problem viewing the page. Reuters HQ is in the UK...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thinking that an embargo is going to solve the problem is misleading and it's only going to make things worst. The population is going to confort themselves that the occidental nations are evil, you give valid arguments to the dictatorial power, only the population is going to suffer.

Conversely opening the market creates bounds between countries and opens the population's mind that will impose the democracy by itself.

<comment><USER27> What is "the problem"?

If you say the embargo solves the problem of fueling a boogeyman enemy to rationalize military spending and fuel nationalism, then I would say it's a quite elegant solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The US acquired the ability to leverage the financial system to enact its will

And now it wont

It doesnt really matter if you are subscribed to the merit of the US' claims or not

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't understand how that would prevent the US from sanctioning those banks and companies that trades with Iran? Regardless if they traded through the described mechanism.

<comment><USER30> Correct. The Secretary of State has already said this. You can do business with America. Or do business with Iran. But you can't do business with both.

<comment><USER23> Beyond mass scale industrial espionage though, what options does the US realistically have if third party countries/trading blocs create a mechanism to hide the trade? Are they going to sanction the EU? Be interesting to see that one play out. It could basically end up with America blacklisting every country outside the US, thus ending up with itself as its only trading partner..

<comment><USER30> The US has the largest spying apparatus on the planet. And yes, we will and have block trade with nations trading with Iran. The Twitter feed for our ambassador to Germany documents all of these cases and in every instance, they have folded.

The reality is that we are 16t worth of trade and Iran is 440b. They're just not worth it.

<comment><USER31> That's really the genius of Trumps foreign policy. He knows the heft of the USA and the spinelessness of EU leaders.

Which really obviates the only real reason to have the EU - combined, all the EU countries are stronger in any field than the US (or China).

That being said the US is a basket case. Sure bully the EU. It'll work today, maybe ten years from now.

But the US is a failing concern, with a completely rotten and corrupt ruling class that lead ppl to vote for an oversized Twinkee for president. World wide hegemony is done in twenty years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We should have embargos on the US for pursuing a climate change program that destroys the planet.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, except that the US has reduced emissions more than any other country and is highly competitive on a per-capita percentage basis.

<comment><USER34> Not true. The US is responsible for 14% of emissions, which is unconscionable for a country that only holds ~4.5% of the world's population. You're actually doing quite horribly on a per-capita basis. China is doing far better than the US on a per-capita count.

<comment><USER35> That is solely because 1/3 of China's population is still living extremely impoverished lives that are equivalent to third world standards. They have 400-500 million people that are still among the poorest on earth. I can't imagine how you think that's an accomplishment that deserves recognition. Their low per capita pollution output due to extreme poverty, is not due to stellar environmental policies by China.

<comment><USER36> I just want to point out that, as of 2012, there was only 6.5% of the population in China living in poverty according to World Bank.

[http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview#3](http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview#3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wouldn't want to lose access to that oil... who cares about preserving the liberal order and not giving an incentive to states to turn rogue? But hey, President Trump is thinking about doing the same thing wrt. the Ukraine, so who am I to complain? Maybe two wrongs can make a right.

<comment><USER38> The Iran regime largely owes its very existence to the way the West (particularly UK and US) behaved towards the country.

Do they think that hitting even harder will have any result?

<comment><USER39> I became an islamist terrorist state because they forced me to.

<comment><USER40> Or maybe all the leaders that weren't awful were forced out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> And yet, they can't reach an agreement with each other.

Edit: I meant this as a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, comment re the Brexit negotiations. It was apparently wrong to do so (?). I even took precious time from the fallacy man ([http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9](http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9)).

<comment><USER42> The EU (minus Britain) are united. Its just Britain that cant agree with itself.

<comment><USER43> If there's one thing about Brexit that Britain can agree on, it's that the deal that's being offered by the EU is awful. It lead to the largest House of Commons defeat for a key government bill in history, and it polls terribly with pretty much everyone. That's why the EU (and most of the British press) have been using the fact that May managed to trade some bad parts of their proposal with differently bad replacements to spin the whole thing as the UK's doing. Pundits also like to potray the EU as an inanimate object incapable of culpability for anything and the UK as the only one responsible for changing.

Also, we don't even know that most of the EU is united even on Brexit - they've carefully held off their required votes on the Brexit deal until after the UK gets it through Parliament, which doesn't look like happening any time soon.

<comment><USER44> A helpful reminder that Britain leaving the EU and Britain getting a 'deal' with the EU are two separate (but related) events.

Britain triggered Article 50 and decided to leave the EU. There's no deal necessary. From the EU's point of view (and a legal one), this isn't a negotiation, just a (sometimes less clearly defined) bureaucratic procedure.

There _is_ of course the question of what Britain's relationship to the EU will look like after Brexit. And it is the EU's responsibility to negotiate a deal which makes that relationship as beneficial for EU member states as possible.

It's simply not their job to care about Britain any more.

Another point worth remembering is that several EU countries don't really have a significant trading relationship with Britain. Imagine if Britain had remained in the EU and Austria was negotiating a 'Brexit-style' deal, for example. How interested would Britain really be in whether that deal was good or bad?

<comment><USER45> Really it seems like Ireland and Spain are the most interested parties when it comes to negotiating with post-EU Britain. And if you look at UK land borders it should be obvious why that is.

This is what's most frustrating about Brexiters complaining about the "unreasonable" offer by the EU. It's not "the EU" imposing those terms, it's the interested parties.

<comment><USER44> I'm by no means an expert, but I wonder if it isn't actually the 'uninterested' EU parties who are turning this into a 'bad' deal for the UK.

After all, with little to lose personally from a poor UK-EU trading deal, those uninterested parties have a much stronger incentive to push for other things they find important (such as freedom of movement).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> A "deal" that has near-zero value for both parties where the EU is more trying to save face by showing it is "independent" while trying to not anger the USA anyway by applying other sanctions. IMHO this is a pretty weak move from the EU, and shows that there is no clear driver behind the EU wheel after the souring of US-EU relations.

<comment><USER47> Lol, what?

This deal is entirely designed to cut US out the loop of international payments, one step at a time. It is extremely valuable to EU to able to conduct oil payments with Iran directly in Euro, without the US being able to say no.

<comment><USER46> Did you read the article? "The European trade vehicle was conceived as a way to help match Iranian oil and gas exports against purchases of EU goods. However, those ambitions have been toned down, with diplomats saying that, realistically, it will be used only for smaller trade, for example of humanitarian products or food." So effectively the EU-Iran trade deal is just a diplomatic move rather than a real trade deal. Also EU companies do not want to risk getting sanctioned by the US by getting into any trade with Iran.

<comment><USER48> Still, it's a diplomatic move that would have been inconceivable (IMHO) under Obama or Bush..

<comment><USER46> Ofc, because with Trump the US-EU relation has got to an all-time low, and now the EU tries to look independent even if it can't but ofc you need to show your voters you are not sold to US interests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why? Why do they bend over backwards for these people?

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/02/france- blames-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/02/france-blames-iran- for-foiled-bomb-attack-near-paris)

[https://freebeacon.com/national-security/eu-sanctions- iran-o...](https://freebeacon.com/national-security/eu-sanctions-iran-over- planned-europe-attacks/)

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/08/iran-behind- tw...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/08/iran-behind-two- assassinations-in-netherlands-minister)

And on and on and on.

</comment><comment><USER50> Yeah, Iran is just a simple country that doesn't deserve any of this... they treat everyone well, don't subjugate half their population along gender lines, aren't responsible for thousands of US and Iraqi causalities, and don't export terrorism across the region.

I know the "America is dumb" line works well on HN, but the naivety of some people here around foreign policy is just kind of staggering. Iran's "own destiny" isn't a positive one, so let's not romanticize it.

<comment><USER51> Do you know the history of Iran? It was once a very progressive country before we interfered in their government. With expose to global markets for Iranian citizens, it may be again.

<comment><USER52> I think you have that backwards. It was another Islamic regime until the west interfered with it. Then it became more progressive due in large part to our interference. Then the Islamists revolted, wanting to regress back to a less progressive state, fearing secularism - which gave us the Islamic state we have today.

<comment><USER53> This is getting the details incorrect and ignoring a century of interference.

Following allied occupation during WWII, Iran was developing a progressive secular government until the US decided to overthrow it as Iran was trying to regain control over it's oil. This led to 25 years of a pro-west regime that can not remotely be considered progressive, followed by the revolution leading to the anti-west regime that also can not be considered progressive.

<comment><USER52> The "progressive secular government" was a despotic dictatorship without a free press, where political opponents of Reza were assassinated, and rule was maintained through the military. The progress was progress for the wealthy. Yes, there was foreign interference before that; but it wasn't better before that either.

<comment><USER53> The progressive secular government was the one under Mosaddegh. Though Reza was the Shah at the time, he did not have the tyrannical power until after the US backed coup, and that period is the pro-west regime I mention.

<comment><USER52> I was referring to Reza Shah, Mohammad Reza's father, who led Iran for decades. Reza Shah is generally credited with being an autocrat, but who is credited with most of Iran's modern nation-building.

Mosaddegh led the nation for two years, half of which he had emergency dictatorial powers, which he used to forcibly reallocate wealth from landowners to tenants. And due to nationalizing oil, he faced a British boycott that caused the economy to fail (and declared the British an enemy... which was unwise). If anything, his short-lived leadership was one of the most rapid and catastrophic failures of leadership of any world nation in recent history. The US led coup was only planned 8 months _after_ the emergency powers were granted to Mosaddegh. 5 months after that, the coup was executed.

<comment><USER53> >If anything, his short-lived leadership was one of the most rapid and catastrophic failures of leadership of any world nation in recent history.

Purely because he resisted Western control over the oil fields. The government was secular and progressive, but the west only cares if you're pro-western interests.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Got contacted by a patent broker. Best course of action? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
So we were getting some traction and suddenly an email from a patent broker with some references to some patent [troll]. The patents they are referencing are pretty general and from years ago when technology that we got traction for and they can be linked to was not remotely possible.
No way we can afford buying a patent or go into legal battle. I would not even talk to a lawyer because we are in bootstrapping mode.
Am I right that the best way to deal with [patent] troll is to not feed it? Can it backfire?
P.S. We are not a software company (if that matters). <comment><USER2> I would say absolutely talk to an attorney. In my opinion (IANAL) it could surely backfire and more like explode on you. I also would not talk to them without an attorney present (do not try to negotiate with them on your own to save a dollar). Unfortunately in most cases they have the upper hand and know it and will exploit any chance however big or small of crushing you. That is how they make their living. A couple hundred dollars to get an attorney's opinion could save you thousands down the road.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I wonder now how much time we have to lay low..

<comment><USER3> Probably a day or two, if you don't get back to them.

Talk to a lawyer - best investment you'll make. Best case, they go away. Worst case, you get sued.

In case you haven't dealt with lawyers before, you want a lawyer specialised in patent law who also has litigation experience. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! One addition - they found us via landing page actually. So they are essentially dealing with a prelaunch startup.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Physics Based Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001135.html

<comment><USER2> +1 for the Bridge Builder mention. One of my all time favorite games.

I started playing the updated original version recently. You can download it from: <http://www.crypticsea.com/>

Gish is also another awesome physics game. Highly recommended!</comment>


The New Tax on Stock Investors Hidden in the Senate Tax Plan - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-fund-companies-argue-proposed-tax-change-will-cost-investors-1510679698 <comment><AUTHOR> "The provision would prevent investors from minimizing taxes by choosing the specific shares that are being sold when they sell part of a position. Instead, investors would have to sell their oldest shares first."</comment>


'Sign in with Apple' will lock you into Apple for good - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@robjbye/sign-in-with-apple-is-the-ultimate-tool-for-ecosystem-lock-in-f5646aeda85c <comment><USER2> > Apple will be shackling your services to your Apple ID, so moving from iOS > to Android will leave you with 3 pretty rubbish options

You then proceed to list inconveniences that are true of every single sign-on service. You even say as much on the last one:

> This is insanely hard to do with Facebook logins (have you ever tried to > remove Facebook from your Spotify account? It's a nightmare)

So the criticism in the post is that "sign in with Apple" lacks where every other service does, but then it has one area where it's better (privacy). I'm failing to see the problem.</comment>


100M and counting: Cristiano Ronaldo's Facebook fan club - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/14/sport/football/football-facebook-ronaldo-100-million/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

<comment><AUTHOR> "For Ronaldo, his attraction is not limited to a single country or region, with research suggesting he's known by over 84% of the world's population -- giving plenty of scope still for him to increase his Facebook and Twitter fan base yet more."</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there so little debate on Trumps plan to destroy net neutrality? - <AUTHOR> Wondering why there is no discussion of this huge issue when it is something that will impact startup founders so badly. <comment><USER2> We still hope it's just a bad dream and he won't get to preside over US.</comment>


Ask HN: I need career advice - <AUTHOR> I have been working as a web developer for over 7 years now.
About 3 days ago I quit my job. I have 30 days before I can work on my own. I am really happy about that part.
I am around 26yo and live in India (in a small city). I can survive without money for sometimes like 1 year. but my father's health is on the decline. I have a big brother but at some point, I have to do my part.
I am really interested in ML, data science, Clojure, software architecture programming languages and want to understand how complex systems like databases work and hopefully work on one.
My experience is mostly on web node/react/nextjs (8 months) and laravel/php/wordpress/codeigniter (All my life). I have also used vue/angular/jquery time to time.
in my free time, I taught my self-different programming languages but never got the chance to use any in production.
> go, oCaml, rust, Haskell, ruby, and python.
What I want to do is learn new things, kinda like research job and get paid for that ? also I don't have any degree in general.
if that does not work out maybe learn new technology and doing things the right way without worrying about deadlines. and small apps and hopefully earn from them?
if nothing all I will work as a freelancer.
So my questions are.
Q. Where should I invest my time?
Q. what should I be learning/working next to have a good position in the near future. <comment><USER2> I'm in same position bro but I have less coding experience and more IT "knowledge"

<comment><AUTHOR> ahhh, is there any way we can talk? you can shoot me an email at </comment></comment><comment>--.

<comment><USER2> Hi i lost your email I'd pm me @ [hdhd42@[g]mail.com</comment></comment>


Why Java Developers Should Check Out Scala - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development/why-java-developers-should-check-out-scala/5753 <comment><USER2> The world is split I assume between the "new wave" which prefer vim, textmate over eclipse / aptana / vstudio, prefer linux/Mac over windows, prefer dynamic and functional over static and object oriented, prefer git over svn, and prefer fun startups over gray enterprises, and I can't blame them.

However, as much as it may surprise, most developers of this world, as much as they would like to work in a startup, work in a gray, corporate enterprise, write Java, Spring and Hibernate, or .NET, and have no clue about anything beyond that.

Scala does a wonderful thing, it allows enterprise developers to taste some of the goodies of Ruby / Python but stay in static Java land. which is great news for everyone.

There are many Enterprise developers who are amazing developers and architects, and can benefit any startup, the more they get close to newer "trends" the more likely the connection will happen.

Young startups will benefit, 40+ enterprise Java architects will benefit, and perhaps the talent wars will have a cease fire.

I'm pushing everyone I know to take a look at Scala, it's here to stay, and if you take a look at play framework, it's looking even more like the next big thing.

It all comes down to the community, if the ruby / rails community will be scala / play friendly, and endorse it as a "ok it's Java but we hate it less", it will help it take off.

As an enterprise developer, I really need something like scala / play to take off, as I won't be able to get ruby on rails / django in the same way I could get play / lift. as much as I think they are great frameworks, it's hard to sell to the enterprise crowd.

<comment><USER3> "dynamic and functional"

I don't understand what you've said here. The two terms are entirely orthogonal. There are functional langauges which are dynamically "typed", and there are functional languages which are statically typed. Lumping the two terms together is misleading and useless.

Static typing (done correctly) is just straight up better than dynamic typing. End sentence. I cannot count the number of times I have had errors at runtime working in python that simply would not have existed at all if I was using a statically typed language. With a sufficiently expressive type system, the types do not get in the way, but you still get compile-time enforced correct static semantics.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Static typing is great. I don't know why all these scripting languages choose to throw out static typing. If a variable is always going to be an integer I don't know why its important to be able to stick characters, strings or objects into it without seeing any errors. It's good for a beginning programmer perhaps, but even with that I tend to disagree since it encourages bad practices.

At some point I just got tired of seeing the same types of errors and wanted my tools to work a lot better. Python / PHP / Ruby aren't improved by lacking static types. How hard would it be to add static types into PHP, Ruby, or Python?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1365333/will-php- become-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1365333/will-php-become-a- full-fledged-statically-typed-oop-language-in-the-near-future)

<comment><USER2> I'm a big static typing fan, but the facts are out there, startups use Rails and Django, and front end is JavaScript, all are dynamically typed, yet very popular.

A good static typed language that the only difference between it and Ruby / Python is the type system, has a good chance in being accepted by a larger audience of developers, both enterprise and startups.

People prefer dynamic as they don't like to compile, and it provides rapid code / refresh cycles, I don't think anyone would say no to less bugs and better refactoring, and to self explanatory APIs using content assist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is one of the first empirical Scala vs Java studies: <http://www.neverworkintheory.org/?p=375>

Here is the actual paper: [http://www.rz.uni- karlsruhe.de/~kb95/papers/pankratius-Scala...](http://www.rz.uni- karlsruhe.de/~kb95/papers/pankratius-Scala-ICSE12-preprint.pdf)

Quote from the conclusion: With respect to effort, this study refutes the claim that Scala programs are faster to develop: in comparison to Java, Scala requires more effort, and especially more testing and debugging effort.

<comment><USER6> My anecdotal evidence agrees with the study. Type inference is also the reason the Scala compiler is so much slower than the Java compiler.

<comment><USER7> Scala has been on the market (i.e. promoted to a broader audience) since 2005 or so. There is plenty of evidence now that Scala is more complex than Java and less suitable for enterprise applications. Despite the fanboy-ism here and on reddit: the Scala hype is over. Definitly.

<comment><USER8> Having used Scala some myself, I wouldn't be surprised that if we look back in ten years, we have come to the conclusion that Scala is the C++ of modern times. It tries to support relatively opposing paradigms (functional programming - object oriented/imperative programming), has a very extensive type system, and drags in a lot of historical baggage via Java.

I guess everyone has encountered the C++ is 'C with better strings and arrays'-type of programmer who doesn't use RAII or the STL. Or the template- fanatic programmer that wants to drag in template meta-programming into every corner of the project. Or the STL fanatic that wants to replace every for-loop by a function in std::algorithm, even if there is no appropriate fit or it requires building a bunch of stateful function objects (thank god we have closures now). Etc.

If projects do not impose serious restrictions, such a broad language will quickly become an incomprehensible mess.

Being a recovering C++ fanatic myself, I believe more in smaller languages try to solve a particular problem now. For instance, take Prolog, it's a beautiful language for what it is aimed at: logic programming. All the weird object- oriented Prolog experiments have died out by now, and it's a language that you use when you want to solve a particular kind of problem.

<comment><USER9> Yes. Scala is C++ of the JVM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scala hits such a sweet spot (at least for me). It's a pleasure to use, the language is so flexible, and you can write very nice, succinct and easy-to- reason-about code. The support for higher-order functions and closures, etc is really nice. I've been doing some android development in Scala and it has a huge impact on productivity.

</comment><comment><USER11> Java's pretty tedious for certain tasks, but it does lend itself well to large teams coding on a large code base and being able to understand everything quickly. Yes, Eclipse is much more heavyweight than vim, and Java's a whole lot more heavyweight than Ruby, but I'd rather peruse through 10M lines of Java code in Eclipse than 1M lines of Ruby code in vim any day.

Even so, I run into the infuriating aspects of Java from time to time, and that's when Scala comes in. I see it to Java as Coffeescript is to Javascript.

<comment><USER9> But 10M line of Java gets a lot less work done than 1M line of Ruby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bad idea.

Better: Why Language Developers Should Stop Making Languages on Top of the JVM.

Imagine if Ruby or Python were only available on top of the JVM... There may be a need for versions of a language that live in the JVM, but don't make the entire ecosystem dependent on it.

<comment><USER12> In general, this is true, but the proper way to view Scala is as a 'fixed' version of Java. Scala isn't really competing for the same mindshare as Ruby/Python/etc., and for good reason. Scala is basically what Java _should_ have been (or at least, that's the goal).

Scala is not truly functional - like Java, it is object-oriented. It just so happens that, once you step outside the Java bastardization of that term and think about a more 'pure' OO, the result is fairly functional-looking. OO and FP aren't really competing paradigms; rather, OO is a more complex paradigm that can be constructed from a functional system. (The inverse is technically true too, but much uglier in practice).

(To give an example of what I mean, Scala supports first-class objects, and functions/methods are included in that statement. Scala does _not_ support first-class, module-level functions (outside an object). That's not functional programming; it's object-oriented! But if you design your OO system well, you get something similar. Java does this badly, because methods aren't first- class objects - and unlike C, you can't really use pointers/references to fake the same behavior, so you get the worst of both worlds).

Of course, Scala has to deal with limitations of the JVM - that's their compromise to gain binary inter-compatibility - but the designs of the two languages are a night-and-day comparison.

<comment><USER13> It is possible to be both object-oriented and functional—for example, OCaml and several Lisps are functional languages that nonetheless feature object systems. The two paradigms are not necessarily in conflict, and Scala is a perfect example of a language which is both. (The definition of 'functional language' is vague and generally somewhat informal, but broadly speaking it has more to do with how one approaches problems than e.g. where functions are defined.)

<comment><USER12> > The two paradigms are not necessarily in conflict.

Agreed - that's my whole point. It's better to think of object-oriented programming as a construction within FP. Of course, some (badly-designed) OO languages like Java sandbox you and restrict your access to some of the more powerful, higher-order concepts, which is why they seem to be 'in conflict', when in reality, one is just a more abstractly implemented, whereas the other's more specifically implemented.

> Scala is a perfect example of a language which is both.

No, it's not - for example, functions have to exist within an instantiation of a class (a singleton object counts). By providing true first-class objects (unlike Java), you get many of the same benefits as first-class functions, but it's fundamentally not the same thing.

Really, an easy way to create a language which supports both is to start with a very basic language with true first-class functions and closures (like Lisp) and then define a few closures that encapsulate state (objects), and then add a couple of basic macros that turn generic functions into bound methods (ie, automatically provide the implicit parameter instead of calling it explicitly).

...which is why I agree that they're not in conflict - a well-designed OO system can be easily implemented within a well-designed functional system!

(The reverse doesn't work so well because you can easily add an implicit parameter to generic functions, but you can't completely remove an implicit parameter from a bound method, even if you pretend it doesn't exist - ie, treat all methods as static methods).

<comment><USER13> A "first-class function" is a function that can be passed to a function, returned from a function, assigned to a variable, or stored in a data structure or basically used in any way that you would use any value. In Scala:

        object Foo {
          def f1(x : Int) : (Int => Int) = {
            return { y : Int => x + y }
          }
          def f2(f : Int => Int) : Int = { return f(5) }
          val f3 = f1(1)
          val f4 = List(f1(2), f1(3), f1(4))
        }

Yes, functions cannot be defined at the toplevel (unless you're in the REPL), but values also cannot be defined at the toplevel; they too must exist within an object or class. In that sense, functions are on equal footing with values.

<comment><USER12> > In that sense, functions are on equal footing with values.

But function objects are not on equal footing with non-function objects. You can nest function objects _or_ non-function objects inside other function/non- function objects, but at the root, you need an object that _isn't_ a function.

At the end of the day, yes, you can do the same things, but my original point was that this doesn't make Scala functional: it makes Scala object-oriented (Java, by contrast, is _not_ properly object-oriented, because it has four kinds that aren't objects).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the more interesting thing is a link in one of the comments:

      http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/scala-the-android-programming-language-you-didnt-know-you-had-170999

...I didn't realise you could use Scala with Android's Dalvik.

Admittedly, that's an article from 2011, and it's probably on hacker news somewhere already, but still...

<comment><USER9> Scala compiler and library implementation ships as a se of jar files, so it can be used in any env that provides the Java API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No. I think Scala is a fine language, with lots of neat features. But it does not give the developer enough of a leap - someone has already mentioned a parallel between C -> C++ and Java -> Scala. I think this is a reasonable comparison.

This is why I tell folks to avoid Scala and pick one of two other great options which offer a fundamental change from Java:

* Groovy (dynamic lang, easy to pick up _and_ master) * Clojure (the power of LISP, steeper learning curve)

There's a bunch of stuff out there which explain why NOT Scala, so I won't regurgitate it here.

</comment><comment><USER16> For anyone who wants to learn more about Scala: Martin odersky's scala class at Coursera starts in two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER17> For anyone who's interested, coursera is offering a Scala course taught by Odersky this fall. It starts the 18th of September.

<https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun>

</comment><comment><USER18> It is too easy to write dense indecipherable code in Scala. Until someone at least comes up with an "Effective Scala" that is as complete as Josh Bloch's "Effective Java" at outlining the best practices for readability and maintainability, Scala will not be an acceptable replacement for Java in larger organizations.

<comment><USER19> <http://twitter.github.com/effectivescala/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> we need a new world where haskell is the new C(++) and Clojure(script) is the new JAVA(Javascript).</comment>


Yq is a portable command-line YAML processor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mikefarah/yq <comment><USER2> Yaml must be the worst syntax ever to parse. Tried to make a yaml diff program for kubectl in .net core. Lists as keys in maps? ...</comment>


Why programming is hard to automate - <AUTHOR> http://www.xamuel.com/programming-hard-to-automate/

<comment><USER2> I think the key here is that the CEO of EA (or whoever at EA decides these things) does just that: "Create a new Fifa game that dramatically increases how easy it is for people to control players around the field." Then suddenly different division of programmers and designers go off and have meetings, decide details and over a year or so put together the next version which is then beta test it with the stakeholders.

When we have AI, why should we expect it to be so different? Just because the search space is vast, doesn't mean that it is impossible to find a solution, it just means that there is a vast solution space as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dijkstra reduced it to a couple of sentences:

> Hence, computing science is —and will always be— concerned with the > interplay between mechanized and human symbol manipulation, usually referred > to as "computing" and "programming" respectively. An immediate benefit of > this insight is that it reveals "automatic programming" as a contradiction > in terms.

From [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Cute, but not quite. To add to 3pt14159's and jessriedel's comments above:

\- Fundamentally, automating programming is equivalent to finding a satisfying assignment / refining a specification; so it is a perfectly well-formed question. (Further, we still don't even _formally know_ if it's hard at all; but I digress.)

\- It seems to me the "short-circuit" argument kinda defeats itself... by the very fact the explanation _itself_ is a great example of short English sentences successfully conveying a huge cardinality of "minor" variations!

\- The "minor variation" device itself seems to me intrinsically flawed. Most (all?) depictions in nature are overwhelmingly _sparse_ \--in the SP sense--, and so most plausible instances of minor variations like "changing one pixel" could arguably be produced in a quasi prefix-free / constant overhead manner from the same underlying English language description. Thus the corresponding " _eps_ -close" spheres of minor variations could well form huge equivalence classes --like one would expect from common sense.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a very bad argument. To add to what 3pt14159 (and the very first blog commenter) said: it's clear that distinct English sentence don't correspond to distinct possible programs; that's silly. A much more sensible way to think about it is to consider the mapping between distinct English sentences to the _sets_ of programs that a human speaker would consider to have fulfilled the request embodied in those sentences. Those sets define a _partition_ of the space of all programs (i.e. equivalence classes), and you can think about the challenge of automating programming as creating a function that maps English sentences to at least one member of the corresponding equivalence class.

Of course, that doesn't help you solve the problem much, but at least it will keep you from getting confused like the OP is.

<comment><USER6> Interesting notion; but you quickly get into a situation like those Genie stories, where the Genie is always doing something you didn't expect. Imagine a computer trying hard to optimize its response to a spoken sentence. "Show me all the records with my name in them." {Ok, I'll delete all the records with his name in them, and show an empty list} and so on.

<comment><USER5> A human speaker would not consider that to have fulfilled the request embodied in that sentence.

In any case, you're discussing the "do as I mean, not what I say" problem, which is completely different than what the OP is talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I'll use "Final Fantasy 7″ but you can mentally replace that with whatever > suits you.

The author is not making a distinction between "art" and "programming". The translation of natural language to a program is arguably _much_ easier than the translation of natural language to a work of art (drawings, animations, music, etc.) because there are fewer assumptions about the world that the machine has to make.

Also, it's probably going to be very hard to reach a point where natural language can be translated to a work of art, but it's not impossible by any means - just envision a large machine that has all the inner workings of a human brain (hopefully a human who was good at making art). All you have to do is tell it "make something good", and it can do it.</comment>


The Measured Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/the-measured-man/309018/ <comment><USER2> I'll accept that there's a lot to be learned from stool, but I don't think this explanation has much to do with it:

 _"Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?," Larry asks me with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. "There are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length is typically one to 10 megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information stored per gram. That's many orders of magnitude more information density than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your stool is far more interesting than a computer."_

<comment><USER3> Have you ever considered which represents a higher bandrate, Internet 2 or a 747-8 filled with your poop flying to Australia?

<comment><USER4> We read that article too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Small, implanted labs-on-a-chip will eventually solve the data gathering problem. Software and lots of data (both your own and others suitably like you, where suitably is a thousands of times more specific than it is today) will identify the difference that are "normal" versus those that are "unhealthy".

This will upend the medical industry, which is one of the most inertial industries in existence. Worse, all the regulations that protect us will ultimately be used to protect it, in far worse ways than the whole RIAA/MPAA thing.

I hope technology can beat it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey! I have crohn's disease too. The way I discovered I had the disease, too late, was when my digestive tract starts to bleed blood. Ulcer was on a blood vessel.

I knew nothing about my body(and still don't) other than I am obese, need exercise, and my guts is in terrible shape. I hope this article, and others like it, will help jumpstart effort to measure my own body for science.

<comment><USER7> I'm surprised that there was no mention of gluten sensitivity and/or gut permeability as possible causes of chronic inflammation. While mainstream medicine is still not sold on the idea, I think the widespread anecdotal evidence merits further study and data-gathering. In my own case, I stopped having chronically inflamed gums when I gave up grains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While this is to the extreme, this level of detail on an annual or 5-year basis could be useful to identify the delta.</comment>


Show HN: Handwritten.js – Convert typed text to realistic handwriting - alias-rahil https://github.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js#README.md <comment><AUTHOR> Non-statistical methods of imitating handwriting are always fairly easy to identify as synthetic due to the uniformity of strokes and unnatural kerning (among other things). Even methods which incorporate random variations don't hide these artifacts sufficiently well. In my opinion, the only way to generate synthetic handwriting which is convincingly real is to use statistical methods (i.e. machine learning) to model all variation which is present in real handwriting. I've implemented a neural network in javascript which does exactly this - [https://seanvasquez.com/handwriting- generation/](https://seanvasquez.com/handwriting-generation/). You can play around with it and find a few weaknesses, but in general I find that it can produce handwriting which is indistinguishable from real handwriting.

<comment><USER2> This is really neat! I love how it looks, and the selection of styles.

A couple of times, using Style #2, it generated a bunch of loops at the end:

Text: "The quick brown fox, etc" Image: [https://pasteboard.co/Jn0O17a.png](https://pasteboard.co/Jn0O17a.png)

Still - nifty, and fun to play with. Makes me want to find an application / excuse to use it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The model was trained on a relatively small dataset which has few occurrences of the letter x, almost none of which are in cursive. As you've found, asking the model to write out an x in a cursive style can totally derail the generation process.

<comment><USER3> Any ELI5 for people who know close to nothing about NN, AI, machine learning etc?

Like, how does one letter it doesn't know how to write well make it skip/mess up the following ones too? I mean, "derail" seems a fitting description to what I'm seeing, but _how_?

<comment><USER4> The "handwriting" data for this model is basically the coordinates of a pen. The length of the string representation of the text is very different from the length of the coordinate representation of the text, therefore the model "learns" a window corresponding to when it is drawing the current letter, and when to start the next letter. For these letters, as the model doesn't learn how long this window should be, nor how to transition from it to the next letter, it gets stuck and outputs nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How realistic is it to have no joined letters? Do many people really write large scale texts letter by letter with space between each?

Sadly, the screenshot looks obviously artificial to me. Like handwriting fonts, I'd be very surprised if anybody thought it was really handwritten.

It's not open source (because it is my handwriting (because my progressive MS means I can't do it manually)), but here's my hack: [https://imgur.com/a/frqG0cu](https://imgur.com/a/frqG0cu)

As sjv says above, there are still plenty of tells in mine. So I think this module is very unconvincing.

Maybe I've spent too much time being finicky or am just being braggy (definitely not beyond me, sorry), but 'realistic'?

<comment><USER6> > How realistic is it to have no joined letters? Do many people really write > large scale texts letter by letter with space between each?

Most of the people I know do this. Myself, I have never ever written with joined letters except when required to in school.

I consider it a leftover from the era of fountain pens (which are terrible UX for me as a left-handed writing LTR languages).

Even my signature is based on separate letters (tho blurred together as sigs usually do).

<comment><USER5> Fascinating. Thanks for responding.

Can I ask what age-group you/they are? And it sounds like you had to write joined-up at school. Why would you stop? Isn't it so much faster?

I went to a snooty high school where fountain pens were compulsory (this was the 80s, not the 50s!). But writing was taught joined-up from pencils in infant school, from when you knew your whole alphabet. It never occurred to me to not join. It would have looked like a very small child's writing. Interesting though that has changed.

My wife is a grade school teacher, and disagrees, but I totally think that teaching handwriting is a waste of time. I wasn't anywhere near as fast writing as typing. I would have been much more productive with a laptop in school.

Anyway. I'm rambling now. Thanks for the response! I stand corrected.

<comment><USER6> I'm 41 - yeah we had learned both joined and "printed" (as we'd call them) letters, with the intention that for handwriting you'd use joined, but it was only required, for a bit, in lower grades in Croatian classes (ie. that'd be English classes in the US/UK/etc).

That was some 33 years ago but I have an 8yr old now and that part of the curriculum is basically the same.

Both then and now kids only need use pencils for this, thankfully :)

For myself, written joined up is more effort and slower than just individual letters. I don't know if that's due to less practice in it, or due to left handed needing to push the pen(cil) more when writing in that style.

I'm way faster touch typing (tho not on a screen keyboard!). If it were up to me, kids today would learn the easiest handwriting method (I believe that's individual letters) and typing, instead of two ways of writing.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Always interesting to find how somr things I take for granted are done/seem elsewhere!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alias-rahil Many times I get university assignments that are compulsory to be submitted as handwritten document. Most of the information needed for the assignment is available on the internet so why not save time? Just make a text document and let handwritten.js do the writing part! example: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias- rahil/handwritten.js...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias- rahil/handwritten.js/master/screenshots/lorem-ipsum.jpeg)

<comment><USER7> This is insane busywork that I hated in college (xUSSR, 20+ years ago). I would scrutinize the example, though. I don't know how "clean" the documents are expected to be, but the picture is too uniform and too clean - no pen marks, etc.

<comment><USER8> That is pretty much the US experience also, most of grade and high school was spent copying information from projector slides onto paper. Guess it is an easy way to fill time, read everything off sentence by sentence, wait for everyone to stop writing, cover the sentences not being read so people who fall behind can't catch up, and speed writers can't get ahead.

I'm very envious of my son, in his classes they distribute the materials via Google drive and spend the class time in discussion and working out problems.

<comment><USER9> Writing things down is a known method of studying. I don't envy your son, he should still write to effectively study

<comment><USER10> Is it though? I've heard very often that lecturing in this fashion is the most inefficient way of transmitting information from a slide onto a notebook without being understood by anyone writing it. If you're processing what you're seeing and summarizing then maybe that works but I think what worked best for me was always asking questions about the material.

<comment><USER11> He says known method, not known _good_ method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't get this project. This is nothing special, you can very easily spot that every T is identical. You might as well just use a handwritten font.

<comment><USER13> It applies Cunningham's Law to find sjv's project above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Producing handwriting is a problem a group of people I belong to is facing. We work (free, on our free time), detecting forgeried signatures of a celebrity on eBay (forgeries that can go to thousdans of dollars).

Forgers are not good imitating signatures, but they discovered how to create the celebrity handwriting using an autopen, which means is harder everyday to distinguish real ones from fake ones. Collectors are used to them - and we track eBay sellers, buyers, etc, so we have an idea of who is who, but people who just want to buy a signed book for a birthday present, may end paying thousdans of dollars but something fake that has no value.

I see the importance of projects like this, but in the other hand, I cant help thinking that every piece of tech that imitates human behaviour can be used for bad.

<comment><USER15> Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. I recommend the Orson Welles film F is for Fake.

<comment><USER14> But if you think you are buying X and receive Y, that's a scam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You might consider turning this into an OpenType font including all the random alternates: [https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/26833/hand...](https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/26833/handwriting- font-that-at-random-picks-characters#27456)

</comment><comment><USER17> I like how trivial it is over the sort of machine-learning solutions I envisioned when I clicked into it.

Does it not support a glyph? Just add it. Produces weird output? It's a bug, not a black box issue, just read the code. Want to use it or port it? It's just character substitution, go ahead.

A fun twist on the idea would be to generate an SVG path for each character and then apply some morphing to the path so character strokes are unique.

</comment><comment><USER18> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170366)

</comment><comment><USER19> I've noticed that I get junk mail now that appears hand written. They go so far as to depress the paper as if with pen in a convincing way. They seem indistinguishable except that they are marketing.

I'm left wondering if there is some new innovation here combined with popularity in some marketing newsletter.

I went looking for the device that could do this and have come up empty- handed. Does anyone know what could create such?

<comment><USER20> Bulk mail is often produced using a letterpress-style machine. Personalized mail, on the other hand, is usually "handwritten" using a pen plotter (e.g., AxiDraw).

[https://axidraw.com/](https://axidraw.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this different than a font?

<comment><USER17> Can a font pick randomly between different versions of the same glyph?

I know a font can define unique ligatures for every character combo, but that would still mean the same combos like "fi" always look the same. Nice thing about this low-tech solution is that it can be trivially scaled up to introduce its own ligatures yet pick from them randomly, just at the expense of chore work (making the images).

Of course, at that point, it would be tempting to start looking for a more general solution.

<comment><USER22> > Can a font pick randomly between different versions of the same glyph?

In theory, yes, OpenType Contextual Alternates can do this.

See "Introducing variety" on this page: [https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/opentype-at-work- co...](https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/opentype-at-work-contextual- alternates)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just tried it, font looks great on paper. I don't have too many uses for this, but I bet it'll be pretty handy for people who are still addicted to reading notes from printed sheets. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER24> It would be great if this could output a generated font file, which can then be used on the web etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Love it! Kinda remind me of the old Hacker News. I wish there were most post like this one.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks good. Where can I use it?

</comment><comment><USER27> how about being able to use OCR to read real handwriting :) that would be truly amazing to accomplish with high precision

</comment><comment><USER28> Feel free to checkout our super-realistic type to handwriting generation in greetings cards here: [https://wuzci.com/product/we-make-a-great- pear-3/](https://wuzci.com/product/we-make-a-great-pear-3/)</comment>


Show HN: Plex Theme – A WP Theme Focused on Writing and Newsletter Subscriptions - <AUTHOR> https://plextheme.com <comment> King-Aaron Forgive me, but I think the template seems a little light in features - <USER2> design - to warrant a fifty-dollar pricetag... Is there some nifty UX components that I'm missing? Or is it just a theme that takes up the left 25% of the screen and nothing more?

<comment><USER3> \+ no subscribe on the bottom in the demo/showcase</comment></comment>


Show HN: Excalidraw – Sketch Hand-Drawn Like Diagrams - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw <comment><USER2> This is wonderful! I was hoping to come across a friendly UI for rough.js and this is as clean as can be. Very appreciated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a blog post talking about the journey and lessons learned: [https://blog.vjeux.com/2020/uncategorized/reflections-on- exc...](https://blog.vjeux.com/2020/uncategorized/reflections-on- excalidraw.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Share your diagrams via links [https://excalidraw.com/?id=4899614721310720](https://excalidraw.com/?id=4899614721310720)

</comment><comment><USER4> When did people start putting testimonials in their README.md?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think it's a bad idea? I figured that it would help people give it the motivation to try it out.

<comment><USER4> It's spammy / too much marketing for GitHub, sort of against the general ethos. Those go on a website, also random Twitter accounts don't give much trust, too much spam / bots over there</comment></comment></comment>


Google Calendar is down - <AUTHOR> https://calendar.google.com <comment><USER2> My smart dishwasher is throwing an IOException!

<comment><USER3> CHANGELOG

* V2.0.5 - Dishwasher is now only compatible with Cleanly.io brand detergent

* V4.1.2 - Dishwasher now only accepts Cleanly.io branded and DRM'd plates and silverware.

* V5.6.2 - Cleanly.io plates and silverware are now single-use only

* V6.0.4 - Dishwasher now only works with Cleanly.io Pure Life water. Please contact your local water supplier for pricing and contracting.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget that Cleanly.io is shutting down, so now your dishwasher won't run at all anymore.

<comment><USER3> Also don't forget the fresh water pipes in your home are owned by Cleanly.io and leased to you, meaning you can no longer receive water until some other company acquires the remnants of Cleanly.io during their decade long bankruptcy proceedings.

The sad thing this, that is not even really satire - ISPs own the fiber in office and multi-resident buildings all the time, and their use is only available to others by lease contracts.

<comment><USER5> Silicon Valley, where people compare the necessity of Internet to that of water.

<comment><USER6> [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/02/08/the-internet-is- a-g...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/02/08/the-internet-is-a-global- public-resource/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano I wonder:

What is the average downtime of Google Mail / calendar vs the average large corporation's exchange server?

Another thought- when Google calendar / mail goes down - it's likely business users blame Google - not the IT group. When a self-hosted exchange server goes down, IT is probably blamed. Leaving an incentive to move toward cloud providers just to shift the blame.

<comment><USER7> The last time Gmail suffered a total and global outage, it resulted in no email lost and delays of at the most 4 hours.

That basically made their outage an argument to switch to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Calendar. We will provide more information shortly. Users of Google Calendar see 'Server Error' page intermittently."

from: [https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=84...](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=847490285bf1b9e082a699bafb95f53b)

</comment><comment><USER9> I find this quite interesting. Have been using Google calendar for about 10 years now, and never experienced downtime before.

<comment><USER10> Been using just as long, and while Google calendar and other Google services have been down before, it's true, it's a very rare occurrence to affect this many users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> General amnesty for missed meetings today.

<comment><USER12> Fortunately Google Calendar syncs with the app, so as long as the app already retrieved your appointments you should be just fine. Same reason why it works even without an internet connection.

<comment><USER13> If you had your Calendar open in a web page it will continue to be readable. I have a pinned tab that I can still see everything 3 months in either direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I dont know what to do with my hands right now

<comment><USER15> All my meetings are on the calendar. I dont know what to do with my life right now

<comment><USER16> [https://xkcd.com/1024/](https://xkcd.com/1024/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portugese, Chinese (zh-Hant), Chinese (zh), Polish, Swedish, Danish, Korean, Russain, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish.

It's fun to ponder why they picked that order and why other popular languages didn't make the cut.

<comment><USER18> Likely their top internationalized user bases.

<comment><USER19> Yeah that's how we do it. Group customer by language, sort by count.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From [http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html](http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html)

      "Monthly Uptime Percentage" means total number of minutes in a calendar month minus the number of minutes of Downtime suffered in a calendar month, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month.

Looks like they forgot to multiply it by 100 (at least in the definition).

<comment><USER21> You can represent percentages as a fraction. No need to multiply by 100.

99/100 = 0.99 = 99%

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Google calendar went down after my robot went to sleep. Even though WiFi (and Google Fibre) is working fine, due to the calendar outage the robot can't receive instructions to get up and continue with work.

Who is going to compensate? Google?

</comment><comment><USER22> > Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This > page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot.

I wonder if they're getting attacked.

<comment><USER23> I got this one for the first time today as well, minutes before the site went down.

<comment><USER24> Same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One of the reasons I use FastMail ([https://fastmail.com](https://fastmail.com)) for email and calendar rather than Google is that when outages happen, the explain what is going on ([http://www.fastmailstatus.com](http://www.fastmailstatus.com)). Outages are inevitable, so having (a) information and (b) the ability to contact a human are valuable features IMO.

<comment><USER26> Google has explained what is going on:

[https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=84...](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=847490285bf1b9e082a699bafb95f53b)

<comment><USER27> Interesting that the status page marks this as a 'service disruption' versus 'service outage'. The page doesn't have any definitions of these terms anyway, so it's hard to know what the difference is.

I was completely unable to access the service. It seems like a 'service outage' to me!

<comment><USER19> The difference might be that outage is down for all, disruption might be down for 50%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I had a notification in my Google Calendar to cancel my Google Music trial. Luckily, Google Calendar went down, after i saw it :)

</comment><comment><USER29> Thankfully my phone caches my calendars. While it's unavailable in a browser, I do see all my events on my phone. Yay!

<comment><USER30> > my phone caches my calendars

The word you're looking for is "synchronizes". This has existed for decades, now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Let's pray for a material design update !

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google reporting "service disruption" for calendar: [http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status)

<comment><USER32> direct link to incident:

[http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=847...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=847490285bf1b9e082a699bafb95f53b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Aaaaand, it's back.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is your regular reminder that it is dangerous that Google has a near monopoly providing free services like calendars and email.

<comment><USER30> I sync my Google calendar to my devices, so if it goes belly up, I can open a new account somewhere else and start using that with little issue.

I do think it's a bad idea to rely 100% on something business critical hosted by someone else, without having your own backup somewhere. Hosted services go down eventually. That doesn't mean we can't use them, just be aware of their limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Who knows if they actually hide tax data in the calendar. No-one [0] would suspect that. Bring down the service to dodge the taxman.

[0] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-probe-spain- idUSKCN...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-probe-spain- idUSKCN0ZG1AC)

</comment><comment><USER35> Calendar and Hangouts [https://twitter.com/GoogleforWork/status/748516307235143681](https://twitter.com/GoogleforWork/status/748516307235143681)

<comment><USER36> That tweet does not say hangouts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Offline since 6:10am PDT according to our logs.

<comment><USER38> Google Calendar became self-aware today at 6:10am. The singularity is upon us.

<comment><USER39> ...and it immediately shut down? Thats kind of depressing.

<comment><USER40> Perhaps it's a benevolent overlord, and it decided that cancelling all our meetings is the best way to make the world a better place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Back up for me on multiple accounts.

</comment><comment><USER42> Seems to be back up now.

</comment><comment><USER43> It must be due to the Spanish Inquisition today. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007940)

<comment><USER44> After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

<comment><USER45> I did - it was in my Outlook calendar

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf_Y4MbUCLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf_Y4MbUCLY)</comment>


8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-mortem-part-1/ <comment><USER2> That's absolutely insane at that clockrate. The way I would get 'animations' (for want of a better term) done is by rendering them frame-by-frame, compressing that and then playing it back at high speed. And even that was next to impossible. Decompressing video @60fps, and doing real-time dithering to increase the effective number of colours and still have time enough for 45KHz audio is totally nuts. This qualifies as art, not just software.

<comment><USER3> "This qualifies as art, not just software."

For me there was never any doubt.

A bit unrelated, but I've got an old 5150 at my parent's place, so when I'm visiting next Xmas I'll try to load this demo onto it. The only problem is that of transferring files to it. It only has a 5.25" floppy drive, and I don't have a means to copy files onto those floppies.

Any suggestions?

<comment><USER4> I have, in the past, been forced to type an Xmodem transfer program into debug.com's hex mode, to get to the point where I can transfer files over a null-modem connection from another box. I can dig up the file in question, if that'd help you out at all.

I ended up typing it in 1k at a time, and independently typing in a CRC32 utility to check that I'd done it properly.

(That was to install Windows 98 on a computer with no drives, if I recall. So, not so very long ago.)

<comment><USER2> That's how I used to transfer files to my coding buddies.

On the phone, hex dump in S-record format, then read out loud while the other side would type in the line. Checksum matches? Next line...

Our respective parents were not too happy about this unplanned usage of their phone lines but it saved a ton of cycling.

<comment><USER3> That's how you do it! What's the today's equivalent that kids do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow... for that hardware, a 4.77MHz 8088 PC with CGA graphics and Sound Blaster audio, those stats are overwhelming:

1\. Variable frame-rates up to 60 FPS.

2\. Audio rates to 45kHz.

3\. 16 colors through composite artifacting.

4\. Simultaneous color and B&W output.

On a related note, you will probably be interested in Michael Abrash's _Zen of Assembly Language_. From the "README.md":

"This is the source for an ebook version of Michael Abrash's Zen of Assembly Language: Volume I, Knowledge, originally published in 1990. Reproduced with blessing of Michael Abrash, converted and maintained by James Gregory. Original conversion produced by Ron Welch."

[https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-zen-of- asm](https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-zen-of-asm)

<comment><USER6> It's worth pointing out (on a quick scan I don't see this called out in the article itself) that the preprocessing involved in generating these executables is almost certainly not meaningfully possible on a 5150 PC.

So while this might run on 1978-era hardware, it wouldn't have been possible for 1978-era hackers to create.

<comment><USER7> Incredible work! If only we had this kind of ingenuity today to get a simple graphics card working with Linux! Imagine the possibilities. One day, I might even have an option in Ubuntu to change the refresh rate to 60hz without entering 'xrandr -r 60' into the console EVERY DAMN TIME I REBOOT. Now, I know I'm going on a limb with this next one, but imagine if someone had the intelligence to code a universal installer that works every time and installed every piece of needed software all at once with zero user interaction??! I'm getting a bit craaazy here, but imagine effortless uninstalls! Mind blown.

Edit: "One more thing" as I get voted down by those in denial. Imagine this brilliance getting Linux to talk to a relatively unheard of device called an iPhone 5s! It sure would be nice getting pictures and video off this damn phone so I can free up space!

<comment><USER8> > getting Linux to talk to a relatively unheard of device called an iPhone 5s! > It sure would be nice getting pictures and video off this damn phone so I > can free up space!

I do it all the time. All it takes is to plug the phone in.

<comment><USER8> Answering the dead question, it's an iPhone 5s running the latest iOS. The only catch is that I have to plug it unlocked and tell it to trust my computer (running Ubuntu 14.04) when the prompt pops up. It imports pictures into Shotwell just fine. I also tested it with an iPhone 4 (not 4S) and it worked just the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The work is very impressive, but the part I loved most was how even after deciding the problem was "impossible" to solve, he kept at it:

> _" Then I thought about the problem for 7 years."_

<comment><USER10> In the demoscene, doing the impossible was just regular behaviour :-) Just look at what they get out of a mere C64...

<comment><USER11> The VIC-II and SID chips in the C64 are amazing. They blew away anything that could be found inside an IBM PC.

<comment><USER12> I'm a softy, but I still think the SID is amazing. The sounds that developers squeezed out of that chip are a testament to true hackery. I have a feeling the tricks developed to stress the SID to it's maximum have been adopted by a lot of serious audio developers in recent years to get higher track count / lower latency / higher bit rate etc. It's like the SID was the home-chemistry set equivalent for many a professional DAW / plugin designer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow - Trixter from Hornet - haven't heard that name in a long time. Always fun to dip back into the demoscene every now and then. Think I might just break out my Mindcandy dvd tonight.

</comment><comment><USER14> At first I wanted to link to C64 productions such as this one [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gG...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gGCLPPyRUxA#t=416) but then I realized that the IBM PC was vastly worse designed than the C64. On the CPU, although running at whopping 4.77 MHz, trivial operations takes loads of cycles. The graphics memory sits on an ISA slot, 8-bit path and few MHz data-rate.

So, well done doing this on a machine that weak!

</comment><comment><USER15> For perspective, it was still difficult doing video in the year 1999... I still remember the lengths some people had to go, to get MPEG working on the Nintendo 64: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080331015735/http://www.gamasut...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080331015735/http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20001004/meynink_01.htm)

<comment><USER15> (Edit - Single Page View: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080326212226/http://www.gamasut...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080326212226/http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20001004/meynink_pfv.htm) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author mentions getting involved with Video for Windows in the early '90s. For a laugh, here's some official VfW sample video from 1992 for comparison: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ieKNtZ8yY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ieKNtZ8yY)

</comment><comment><USER17> 8088 Domination is one of the examples of truest hacking and deserves to be sticky on HN. I mean it!

</comment><comment><USER18> This is truly impressive, I'm amazed by how fast it renders. So I guess Mr. Gates was right, you only need 64k...

<comment><USER2> > So I guess Mr. Gates was right, you only need 64k...

That was 640K.

<comment><USER19> And it wasn't Bill Gates who said that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The PC I ever used was an Amstrad 8086 CGA, seeing the 4 colour palette 1 again made me super nostalgic. Somehow back then playing games with only black, white, magenta and cyan didn't bother me.

<comment><USER21> The Amstrad PC1512/PC1640 actually had this quirky 640x200x16 color mode. I only ever came across one piece of software except the bundled GEM that supported it though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wiz / Imphobia here.. Damn, that is dedication. I didn't know there was a 160x200 X 4 bits resolution on the CGA card. How was that activated ?

<comment><USER22> Wikipedia has a bit under "special effects on composite monitors" [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You might also be interested in these efforts to get video playing on the Sega Genesis ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vPe452cegU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vPe452cegU)) and the TI-84 graphing calculator ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pAeWf3NPNU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pAeWf3NPNU))

</comment><comment><USER24> If someone in 1981 had seen this running on the same hardware they would have assumed it was alien software created by a higher lever species.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I never knew CGA could do 16 colors. In my memory 16 colors is EGA.

<comment><USER25> That caught my attention as well. I wish I knew this trick 3 decades ago.. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#160.C3.9...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#160.C3.97100_16_color_mode)

<comment><USER10> Interstingly they talk about the "change palette in the middle of the screen" tricks that we used in Imphobia. The precision timing was certainly tricky, especially when playing a MOD-file while drawing ! Ahhh memories...

<comment><USER2> Try changing _modes_ in the middle of the scan :)

<comment><USER26> Argh ! was that possible ? I actually stop playing with that with my last overscan "320 x +/\- 240" attempt during which, for some reason, the screen beamer concentrated itself on exactly on scan line of the screen, rendering it super bright and emitting a super scary sound. My screen always had a darker line in the middle of it since that experiment :-( You could _actually_ damage things by playing with hardware...

<comment><USER2> > Argh ! was that possible ?

Sure, if you were prepared to give up a few scanlines for the register changes. The monitor will happily continue to scan as long as the basics (vertical resolution, frame rate) don't change and you make the the coils are still being swept.

That's why you ended up with that darker scanline, for a brief time the vertical deflection was turned off and that caused that one scanline to be hit by the electron beam in rapid succession at an intensity that it normally would not receive.

It's like looking into the sun.

Scanning is the hard part, so you don't need to worry too much if you keep the timing steady but you can change things like colours, palette contents, horizontal resolution without too much trouble.

If you're going to mess with the vertical resolution then you'll have to have write access to the register that counts the scanlines (and you'll need to set it to what it would have been had the whole screen be that resolution).

And of course at the end of the frame you have to switch it all back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I imagine that part 2 is effectively going to involve "compiling" the sequences to assembly and executing them. You just don't have a lot of cycles to do much math on the 8088, so you may as well just write compile this as a big assembly program and start running it.

Looking forward to part 2 very much.

<comment><USER28> Part 2 is already up, no? [http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/20/8088-domination- post-...](http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/20/8088-domination-post-mortem- conclusion/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This reminds me of Yoomp!

[http://yoomp.atari.pl/media.htm](http://yoomp.atari.pl/media.htm)

1.79 MHz 6502..

</comment><comment><USER17> Second (and the last) part of trixter's write-up on how 8088 Domination was achieved is already up there.

8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Conclusion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924928)

</comment><comment><USER30> As a person who started with 24-bit colors, I only have a lot of respect for Jim.

</comment><comment><USER31> The Spaceballs references almost makes me cry of nostalgia. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER32> I can't wait to try this out. I still have my 4.77 MHz 8088 IBM PC with CGA video.

I don't have a monitor for it anymore, but that is fine since this was designed for the composite out anyway which I can put on a TV.

And I need to find an 8-bit SoundBlaster to put back in it.

Nice to see trixter doing stuff. I remember him from demoscene stuff in the 90s. Back then, PC demos were for 386/486/Pentium and VGA graphics. Nobody bothered with PC or XT (or CGA or EGA graphics) even back then.

</comment><comment><USER31> The references to Spaceballs left a nostalgic tear in my eye.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's fascinating that the developer basically reinvented RLE, but did it significantly better.

</comment><comment><USER34> When you can adapt the problem to the solution, the solution becomes much easier. Real-world problems are rarely so adaptable, first issue being "code from bare metal up" is rarely an option.

</comment><comment><USER35> This makes me want to run this on my 8088. Does it fit on a 10 MB HD? Also, I wonder if any of the old floppies I have still work... I haven't turned the thing on in over a decade.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder how well PC emulators will render this :-)

<comment><USER37> I don't know of any accurate IBM PC emulator. Most of the typical ones like DosBox will play it either too fast or too slow.

<comment><USER38> Dosbox plays it fine, but only B&W.

<comment><USER37> With mode=cga it plays in color, though some of the colors are inaccurate compared to a real PC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wow, this is the first time I've seen Bad Apple on HN. That alone is enough to earn my upvote!

</comment><comment><USER40> This looks like reimplementation on animated GIF.

<comment><USER41> That is not at all like how GIF animation works.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#A...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Animated_GIF)

<comment><USER40> Umm yes it is?

"Some economy of data is possible where a frame need only rewrite a portion of the pixels of the display, because the Image Descriptor can define a smaller rectangle to be rescanned instead of the whole image"

Every frame of animated gif can choose to modify small portion of previously drawn image. This is why you cant display animated gif starting in the middle, you will only render moving parts until you loop whole thing.

This is precisely what Author implemented, he is encoding changes between frames, this way cpu has to only modify parts of display memory that are changing.

How is that not the way animated gif works?

<comment><USER42> This is delta coding; it's _part_ of animated GIF, which then applies LZW compression to the deltas. This guy has used RLE compression (like TIFF, I believe) instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Amazing!</comment>


Trust is what you should optimize during the Covid-19 pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://vwo.com/blog/covid-19-and-optimizing-for-trust/ <comment><USER2> Sanction and fine the Chinese communist party and their officers for the catastrophe they inflicted on the world. Never again.</comment>